By Marc Jones
LONDON, June 30 (Reuters) – Investors have had to gulp down the motion-sickness tablets this year as the turmoil from the Iran war has clashed with a seemingly unstoppable boom in all things AI and otherworldly.
Global stocks are now $7 trillion higher than at the end of 2025, even though the war caused a $9 trillion drop in March, when oil shot to $120 a barrel and hopes of lower interest rates were dashed.
South Korea’s stock market has surged by 100% and Elon Musk’s $2 trillion SpaceX has blasted off, but the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants are down as a set and gold has suddenly lost its shine.
Chief economic adviser at Equity Bank, Charlie Robertson, said it has been astounding, not because of what has happened, but because of what has not happened.
“We have had one of the greatest geopolitical shocks that it has been possible to imagine and it has still not undermined global markets,” he said.
The MSCI All-Country World index has jumped almost 10%, or roughly $7 trillion in market capitalisation, in the first half of the year. It has also registered the best second quarter since 2020, though it paled compared with South Korea’s record-breaking run.
Currency markets, meanwhile, have been gripped by the woes of the Japanese yen, which is at a 40-year low despite Tokyo spending 11.7 trillion yen ($72.25 billion) trying to prop it up.
The Nikkei has shot up almost 40%, but State Street’s head of global macro strategy, Michael Metcalfe, said the yen’s fate has now become a key global risk point.
“It is all about what happens to Japanese fixed-income demand if you have a crisis in the yen,” he said, describing the risk that higher Japanese interest rates drive money back into Japan and trigger selloffs elsewhere.
The dollar’s broader 3% rise suggests recent talk of its demise has been premature, Metcalfe added, though BofA analysts say it remains a “rent, not an own” for now.
WILD RIDE FROM DAY ONE
This year has been a wild ride, with the United States’ capture of Venezuela’s president and then Donald Trump’s demands to take control of Greenland while issuing tariff threats to all and sundry.
January brought the biggest monthly rise in gold prices since the latter stages of the global financial crisis, but they have gone into reverse more recently.
Gold is down more than 12% in June, on track for its worst month since October 2008 and its biggest quarterly drop since 2013. To be fair, it had doubled in value since the start of last year.
Venezuelan bonds, which Caracas has not made a payment on for nine years, have soared 55% since the U.S. capture of President Nicolas Maduro, making them the world’s best performers.
